Game On! Podcast featuring guest Al Lowe
Al Lowe
In this episode of GAME ON, host Adam Bellow interviews Al Lowe, who is a pioneer in the PC gaming space. Al Lowe created numerous games that were beloved by many including the educational classic, Donald Duck's Playground, as well as the Leisure Suit Larry game series, amongst others. Al began his career in education and has had a unique and amazing journey to learning new things and finding success along the way.
Learn more about Al Lowe at: http://www.allowe.com
Game On! – Guest Al Lowe - Transcript
Adam (00:00.494)
All right, welcome to the Game On podcast. I'm your host, Adam Bellow, and I'm really excited to be joined here by an incredible, incredible pioneer in the world of educational and just computer gaming, Al Lowe. So Al, thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome.
Al Lowe (00:16.166)
So is that a way to say that I'm really old?
Adam (00:18.67)
Oh, I'm pretty old. So if you're really old, I don't know. It's no, no, it's just, it's wonderful to have this opportunity to kind of talk to people that are not only inspiring, but also have just helped pave a path to what we do here at Breakout. So it means a great deal for you to come in and share a little bit with our audience. So thank you.
Al Lowe (00:20.646)
Ha ha ha.
Al Lowe (00:36.998)
It is my pleasure to speak with you today.
Adam (00:39.182)
Well, awesome. So, you know, how would you introduce yourself? Like what's your elevator pitch to kind of who you are or, you know, what you've been doing?
Al Lowe (00:48.806)
Gosh, I guess I was an early programmer, designer, writer of adventure games. I particularly liked adventure games because that's what I started playing and I was pretty good at it. I didn't like Twitch games and action games and things because I suck. And My focus went to adventure games and I started by...
I started by convincing my wife that we should spend a full month of our combined incomes to buy an Apple II Plus with 48K of memory, two floppy drives, and a nine inch green screen monitor. That was how much money it cost back then. It was very expensive.
Adam (01:45.166)
That's unbelievable.
Al Lowe (01:46.598)
And I convinced her that if she let me pay, you know, buy this thing, that I would somehow figure out a way to make it pay for itself.
Adam (01:54.446)
Hey, where there's a will, there's a way. And so you mentioned spending your salaries. What I know, and I don't think the audience knows yet, what was your job at the time?
Al Lowe (01:56.774)
Yeah.
Al Lowe (02:04.774)
My wife and I were both school district music coordinators. She handled vocal music. I handled instrumental music for a fairly large school district in central California. Yeah. What else, what else could a guy do who was a, uh, uh, proto nerd? I was, I was geeky in when I was in grade school. I was the kid who jumped up to fix the.
Adam (02:16.206)
That's amazing. That's amazing. So yeah, I mean, it's a
Al Lowe (02:33.062)
film projector when it jammed. I was the guy who soldered the microphone cables when they went bad. I'm the guy that built the speakers for my band and all that stuff. I was into electronics. I built a Dyna kit, stereo amplifier and preamplifier because a Heath kit was too common.
Adam (02:50.99)
Yeah.
Adam (02:59.118)
That's awesome. That's very, very cool. So you mentioned games that you didn't like, and so that's what brought you to designing games. But, you know, my level one question for you play is super important to us here at Breakout. So I always like to ask people what games they played when they were kids and then what games they're playing now. So obviously I know that there's a large period where you spend time creating the games. What do you remember playing as a youngster?
Al Lowe (03:00.39)
I went for the high end, yeah.
Yeah.
Al Lowe (03:25.606)
Well, all we had when I was young was rocks and dirt. No, let's see. My family was big on Monopoly. We played a lot of board games. We played a lot of card games. Canasta. Who's heard of that? Nobody knows that game anymore. Yeah. Yeah. It's a mom game. Yeah, that's right. Yep. And that was one of the things we played.
Adam (03:42.318)
Oh, okay. My mom plays that. She's a retired woman on, yeah, yeah.
Al Lowe (03:51.75)
So, you know, no video games or anything. I remember the first time I saw a Pong, I was a grown man. I don't know, I was 35 or something, you know, and saw this and said, my God, this is amazing. Look at what you can do with computers.
Adam (04:08.878)
It is incredible and we'll get to some of the things you built with computers in just a second. But before we jump into that, what do you play now? So now that you're not making games actively anymore, do you still play games? You play on your phone, you play on the computer?
Al Lowe (04:22.214)
The only thing I play is on my phone. I played backgammon and free sell. I love free sell and, but I do it. I do speed free sell. So I can't, I can't quit until I solve the free sell in under 90 seconds. Yeah. So I'll play, I'll play two or three or four games before I can finally get one.
Adam (04:27.918)
Okay.
Adam (04:31.918)
Awesome.
Adam (04:37.454)
Okay.
Adam (04:44.43)
Wow, that's pretty impressive.
Al Lowe (04:50.502)
under 90 seconds, but that's my goal is to, you know, so, so no adventure games, no, no video games to speak of. We don't want console anymore. Um, yeah. So I, I, I, I'm a terrible example of, uh,
Adam (04:52.654)
That's awesome.
Adam (05:01.166)
That's awesome.
Well, listen, I mean, you spend so much of your life and career building these amazing games that I remember very fondly, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners do too.
Al Lowe (05:10.374)
Yeah. You know, it's interesting in that I, uh, I was fascinated by games before I got into the business. And when I got into it and was making games myself, I played a lot of games, but it was always market research. It wasn't, uh, enjoyment. It wasn't play for pleasure or, you know, it was, how do they do that? Or, Oh, I see. Oh, I could steal that idea. There's an idea I'd use.
Adam (05:35.758)
Hahaha.
Al Lowe (05:37.702)
That kind of thing, it was all market research. And then once you know how the sausage is made, you're not as interested in making sausage.
Adam (05:48.014)
eating it. Yeah. All right. Well, that makes sense. I don't think we actually got into some of the things you did get to create. So I'd love if you don't mind, like kind of.
You know, once you started creating your own games, we talked right before we started recording. We start talked about Black Cauldron and then obviously working your way up, obviously as the creator. We didn't say this yet, but Al is most famously, I think, the creator of the Leisure Suit Larry game series that was put out at Sierra, which is amazing. But also one of the games that I love to talk about internally at Breakout with our team, we talk about all the time, an educational game I remember playing as a kid when I was five or six called Donald Duck's Playground. So I'm sure there's a lot of
Al Lowe (06:13.574)
Guilty.
Al Lowe (06:27.302)
I was very proud of Donald Duck's playground. There was a weird thing happened in 1982. Disney had authorized Texas Instruments to be the exclusive user of their characters. TI paid a lot of money to Disney and said, we want exclusive rights to the Disney characters.
Adam (06:27.456)
stepping stones in between. So if you want to kind of take us on the little journey.
Adam (06:52.91)
I'll bet.
Al Lowe (06:57.158)
They also paid a lot of money to Mattel, Barbie and all those products and some other companies too. I mean, it was a big, they wanted to buy their way into the home market with their big Texas instrument 99, the TI -99 computer. Well, people saw the TI -99 and it was pretty pricey and it didn't do much and it didn't have a lot of support. And finally, in one day in the fall of
1982, they decided to get out of the business. And they...
Al Lowe (07:36.614)
They just stopped making computers and they stopped making software. And they said, we quit. We're just out. Ken knew somebody, Ken Williams, who's the founder and CEO of Sierra, knew somebody at TI and called him up and said, what's going on with that software? And he said, well, I think the rights are available. If you want to buy them, they could probably get them cheap. And because we signed this horrible deal with Disney where we do all the work and they get all the money.
And Ken said, oh, that sounds good to me. So he ended up buying the rights from the TI. And so for about two or three years, we were Walt Disney Software. Nobody knew it particularly, but I designed the Donald Duck's Playground game. I designed Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, which I was very proud of. It won a lot of awards. And I wrote the music for
Adam (08:19.566)
That's awesome.
Al Lowe (08:35.718)
Donald Duck, no, for Mickey Mouse's Space Adventure. And there were other games as well. So we put out several games with this. But what happened was after we sold them for a long time, we realized they don't sell any better than the games that we make up ourselves about our own characters. And our games, we get to keep all the money. And Disney's games, we get a little fraction and they get all the rest.
Adam (08:39.502)
OK.
Adam (09:00.526)
Hahaha
Al Lowe (09:05.03)
And so Ken said, let's just, we'll just give this up. We'll go back to making games ourselves. And that's when the game Space Quest and Police Quest and Larry and Laura Bo, all those, yeah, Quest for Glory, all those games came out right after we lost the, or not lost, gave up the Disney characters.
Adam (09:18.656)
King's Quest or Larva, yeah. Yep.
Adam (09:30.862)
Yeah, what a fascinating story. And I actually mentioned to a friend of mine, I was like, oh, you'll never guess who I'm interviewing for the podcast. And he literally said to me when I mentioned that you had created the Donald Duck game, he literally said, oh, I remember catching watermelons. So here we are literally almost 40 years removed from it and people remember it really well. So my team's probably sick of me talking to them. I'm talking to people that are much younger than I am. And I'm talking about this game and they're like, what are you talking about? I'm like, I send people screenshots. There's a video on YouTube.
Al Lowe (09:45.83)
Ha ha ha ha.
Adam (10:00.816)
I reference it quite a lot, so I thank you both as a kid playing it, but also as creative inspiration for some of the stuff we're working on now here at Breakout.
Al Lowe (10:08.166)
Well, you're welcome. It won an educational game of the year from several publications.
Adam (10:14.222)
It's a great game. I mean, for those that haven't played it, there's multiple mini puzzles. And then the goal is that Donald Duck is doing these different tasks and earns money at each task and can go buy parts of his playground and then walks across the street, builds a playground. I mean, it is a brilliant, simple construct, but something that today falls into all these other games where people are doing the same thing. There's mini games and a grand purpose. It's awesome.
Al Lowe (10:38.534)
I was proud of the idea that when you won the games, you spent your money altruistically by giving your nephews a present. I don't know that that was ever mentioned in any of the reviews or anything, but I thought, well, that's a nice way to teach people to share. Anyway.
Adam (11:06.126)
Yeah, I love it. I love it. I love it. And you're also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one of my other favorite games that I'm sure, I mean, obviously it pales in terms of Larry's fame, but I remember playing Freddy Farkas Frontier Pharmacist quite a bit when I was a kid as well. So, you know, so many titles you've been involved in. I did, I did, it was a CD -ROM, I think. I mean, uh.
Al Lowe (11:19.302)
Yeah. I love that game. Did you play it with sound with the voices? Yeah, that's the best way because we put out a silent version first right when CD -ROMs were catching on, you know, when they started, we put out the silent version and I said, we've got to make this game talk, you know, it's got to be a talkie. So if you get a chance, go find the talk, you can probably download it anywhere now. I would.
Adam (11:30.958)
Okay.
Adam (11:34.862)
Mm -hmm.
Adam (11:43.214)
That's awesome.
Adam (11:47.598)
I would imagine.
Al Lowe (11:48.774)
I wouldn't encourage people to pirate software, but...
Adam (11:52.462)
I think you could probably buy it on... Gog or Steam or somewhere, I would imagine. Yeah. Yeah.
Al Lowe (11:56.07)
You should be able to. Yeah. Yeah. And of course they should send me a nickel or dime or something. No, no, no, no. I get zero. I get nothing.
Adam (12:02.126)
I would hope so. Yeah, I was gonna say.
Adam (12:07.694)
Well, that whole Sierra issue is another, I'm sure, another story for...
Al Lowe (12:12.39)
Yeah, the business story is ugly and extreme. But you could learn about that if you buy Ken Williams' book. What's the title of it? Not All Fairy Tales. That's it. Yeah.
Adam (12:22.03)
I think it's all fairy tales have happy ending, not all fairies have happy endings. Yeah, which we actually read as a team, we have a book club, a couple of us participated in. So that was one that we recommended. We read that a couple of months ago. So yeah.
Al Lowe (12:32.294)
Yeah.
Yes, good.
Adam (12:36.366)
Well, awesome. So let's get back to you and kind of your, we went through a little bit of your origin story with being a music teacher and then, and, you know, convincing your wife to get a computer, which again, this sounds like very kindred spirits. It sounds like something I would very much do and be like, I promise we'll figure out a way to make it work. Yeah, I would imagine, but it certainly did. So I'd love to talk about kind of.
Al Lowe (12:53.511)
There was a lot of that going on back then.
Adam (13:01.294)
Our level three question, we'll skip over level two because we kind of captured that already, but our level three question here is about challenges. So if you could share kind of one of the biggest challenges or obstacles that you had to overcome in your journey to kind of reach the, at any point to find the success that you found. So maybe it's a programming issue, maybe it's something just, you know, anything that was a challenge at the time that you were able to overcome.
Al Lowe (13:23.814)
In the early years, the market was shifting so rapidly that there was a period in the early 80s when every project I did, I either had to learn a new computer or a new language or a new operating system or multiples of the above. We were constantly changing. We were moving from platform to platform.
I started on an Apple II, but we quickly realized that COM64 was where all the money was that we should start selling 64 games. So one of the guys at Sierra figured out a cartridge. He figured out a way that this is pretty geeky. I'm going to get geeky here for a second. He figured out a way that you could plug in an eight pin chip adapter.
Adam (14:13.838)
Go for it, go for it.
Al Lowe (14:23.014)
into the joystick port. Back then, Apple joysticks literally ended in eight little spider pins sticking out and you had to plug that into the port. Okay, so he figured out if he plugged in a wire to that port, then he could jiggle those wires and at the other end of the wire, he had a cartridge that went into the COM64. So I would...
run the program that was on this cartridge on the Commodore and I would run the send program that he wrote on the Apple and I would transfer an entire program through that wire from one machine to the other. So I did all my work on the Apple, compiled it, assembled it and then transferred it over and then I could test it on the Commodore. So it was, yeah, Bob Heitman was his name. He was a genius. I
Adam (15:03.566)
Wow.
Adam (15:14.83)
That's unbelievable.
Adam (15:19.726)
That sounds amazing. That's amazing. So that's definitely a challenge to have overcome. And what, how, so, I mean, this is just off the cuff. How many machines did you guys write for? Cause obviously I know I played most of the games on PC and 64.
Al Lowe (15:19.846)
I admire him so much. Yeah.
Al Lowe (15:25.03)
Now, that was a real challenge.
Al Lowe (15:34.278)
Oh.
I used to get a spreadsheet that said, you sold this many copies of Winnie the Pooh in the 100 -acre wood for the Apple II, and you sold this many copies for the Commodore 64, and you sold this many for the VIC -20, and you sold this many for the Apple II GS, and you sold this many for the IBM PC, and it was just, oh, Atari, Atari 400 and 800 were different machines.
Adam (15:54.51)
Mm -hmm.
Al Lowe (16:06.086)
Uh, radio shack, uh, TRS eighties, um, the Coco color computer was a different product. Um, so I had a spreadsheet full of, of, uh, list of computers that, um, uh, and I got a, uh, a notice every month that said, you sold this many copies of this on this machine. And yeah, it was a lot of machines. We supported a lot of stuff. And we also supported IBM PCs that didn't have graphics cards.
Adam (16:29.742)
That's pretty amazing.
Al Lowe (16:36.038)
or that had monochrome graphics cards. Because when PCs first came out, they had just text. And then if you were a rich businessman, you would buy a Hercules monochrome graphics card and hook it up to your TV. And then you could get this horrible single monotone, but you could have graphics. And you convinced your wife that you would use it for spreadsheets.
Adam (16:39.886)
Okay.
Al Lowe (17:04.838)
But what you really did was play games. Ugly, ugly games. And then, then the CGA cards came out and they had a whopping four colors, which was more than anybody needed. Yeah.
Adam (17:07.246)
That's awesome. Yeah.
I remember the early days, that's funny.
Adam (17:24.014)
I tell my kids about this and I get the typical eye roll and the the comment of oh back in my day, you know But I always I walk up through I'm like there was CGA EGA VGA SBGA, you know XGA I'm like they don't even understand now. It's like oh we download
Al Lowe (17:28.07)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Al Lowe (17:39.014)
Well, and we, and I had to buy each one of those cards. I want it didn't come in the machine. I bought, I bought the first EGA card I bought was $600 just for the damn car. And that was in old money. That was 1980s money, you know? Yeah.
Adam (17:42.702)
That's right. That's right.
Adam (17:50.51)
Wow, just for the card.
Yeah, that's unbelievable. Yeah, it's really funny to think how far things have come. I remember I begged my parents for a CD -ROM we saved for two years to get a CD -ROM. I got one when I was a teenager. And that's, you know, the games like Freddy Farkas and Fantaspegory and other things that had all that animation and video is incredible.
Al Lowe (18:06.374)
Oh.
Al Lowe (18:16.166)
The first CD reader I got was $600. And then the CD burners came out. And the CD, the CD burner, the first one that Ken bought was $50 ,000. And it mostly made coasters. Almost always it would do something wrong and you'd throw it away. But.
Adam (18:23.598)
Yep. And you need to get a Sound Blaster card too on top of it to, you know, MIDI card or whatever.
Al Lowe (18:45.062)
but it was $50 ,000 for the first box. And then I bought one when it got down to 1200, I think it was. So yeah, it was a, it was, it was an expensive time.
Adam (18:47.726)
That's amazing.
Adam (18:53.454)
Yep, that's great.
Adam (18:58.67)
It really was. And obviously, you know, there's so many things that you learned along the way, especially not having been trained, you know, like I relate to that story. A lot of the a lot of the folks on my team were educators that kind of fell into this educational technology business. And, you know, so I was an English teacher by trade and then kept on doing different roles. And my co -founders and a lot of the folks here have been doing different roles as well. So you kind of self -taught yourself all of these things along the way, which is unbelievable.
We do like to ask a level five question, our last official question over here is, what's the best piece of advice that you've gotten in your career journey? And then the second part of that is, what's a piece of advice you would give anybody listening?
Al Lowe (26:57.825)
Well, the best advice I got was...
I learned to program in Apple Soft Basic and I produced games that worked. And when I sold them to Sierra, Ken Williams said, well, you can't sell a game that's written in Basic. You have to rewrite those in assembly language. And I said, well, okay. All right. So I bought an assembler and I did a bunch of stuff and I took all the code and
and turned it into assembly language and it ran exactly the same. There was nothing in the code that was slowing it down in basic. But his lesson was learn the computer, learn assembly language, learn how the inside of the machine works, what you can do by manipulating bits and nibbles instead of bytes and so forth.
And that was important and that came into play later on. We did some things in adventure games that, that, uh, uh, people didn't think we could do because we use that. And then later when I fell out of retirement, the first time, uh, I ended up using that same skill set there. Uh, so I would say that's a good idea. Learn as much as you can inside the belly of the beast. Get down inside and don't let, don't live at the high level.
Adam (28:24.75)
That's awesome.
Al Lowe (28:29.953)
And the best advice I can give somebody would be, it's harder than you think. And if you're good at it, it takes more time and more care and concern to make a good product.
Adam (28:44.59)
Yeah, I totally agree with that. It's clear that there's so much that you've been able to accomplish. And obviously, there's a lot of just hearing you talk about reminiscing about the things you learned along the way. I can only imagine the pride that you have thinking back on how hard those problems must have been. So it's great. It's great advice to hear from someone that's lived it and done it. My question, I'm completely going back to kind of your.
Al Lowe (29:06.113)
They were.
Adam (29:13.294)
large library of things you've worked on. What's your favorite project? Is there a particular game, either one of a series or just a game that you worked on that was your personal favorite?
Al Lowe (29:25.089)
Well, I was very pleased with a game that doesn't get much recognition called Torren's Passage. It's probably not high on your list, but it was, I had been writing Larry games and my kids were 13 and seven, I guess, something like that, 14 and seven. And, um,
Adam (29:33.518)
I remember Tori's passage. I remember it though.
Al Lowe (29:52.641)
They hadn't, I didn't really let them play, Larry, you know, it just didn't seem apropos. And so I thought, Ken said, I'd like to have a game that we could sell in the opposite Christmas from King's Quest, because King's Quest was a big seller, but it took two years to do a game. And so he had nothing to sell on these odd numbered Christmases. And he said, can you do a family game for those years? And I said, yeah, sure. So I created a...
five game outline of what would this guy's life and what would happen to him and you know concluding with his death in the fifth game and and he approved it liked it and we created a world that gave lots and lots of possibilities.
Al Lowe (30:42.209)
physically impossible, but but artistically and literally literally impossible, but but made good literature, I guess. Anyway, that was a Torrance passage. So I'm particularly proud of that because it's a game that I wrote which didn't catch on. It's a genre that nobody else really followed. It was written so that an adult could play it with a child and.
Both of them would laugh at different times. And I got the idea because I took my family to see Mrs. Doubtfire. And when Robin Williams would say something funny, there were two pitches of laughter. There was one where he'd do something slapstick or silly or catch his boobs on fire or whatever. And all the kids would, there was this high -pitched titter of laughter. And then when he would do some double entendre that,
that the kids didn't get, you could hear all the adults go, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho
Adam (31:55.598)
That's awesome.
very very cool. Yeah I feel like that's the secret sauce they hit with those Pixar movies and the Shrek movies and stuff where there's two levels of viewership. That's awesome. Exactly, of course, of course they played Torrance Passage and therefore they knew.
Al Lowe (32:08.641)
Yeah, yeah, I think they learned that from me. Yeah.
Actually, before I did that title, I did a study of Disney films. I went through a lot, all the ones I could rent, you know, VHS, remember that? I went through all the ones I could rent and took notes as to how it worked. And so I included a sidekick that he could talk to. I included an evil person, you know, that was the villain. And I included...
Adam (32:29.134)
Yes.
Al Lowe (32:44.737)
I just like all the things that I found from the Disney films. I tried to insert in there, not steal, but just the same concept. You use the same idea.
Adam (32:51.054)
No, it's a trope. It's a concept. I love it. I love it. And listen, that's how people pay homage. And I think you took it into a different genre. And I, for one, again, am just eternally grateful because I think that it's given both I really genuinely have enjoyed playing the games you created and get to now 30, 40 years later, get to work at a company where that's the focus of what we do is to make these types of games for kids for learning. So.
You know, thank you.
Al Lowe (33:20.865)
Yeah, good. And with Larry, they'll learn something else.
Adam (33:23.214)
That's true, that's true. Everything's a learning opportunity for sure. Well, Al, thank you so much. I greatly appreciate your time and sharing with us a little today. Other than your website, is there anything that you want folks to know about you or anything they should follow you online or anything like that?
Al Lowe (33:34.913)
You're welcome.
Al Lowe (33:42.337)
For the past 24 years, every morning I've sent out two jokes in an email. One of the jokes is clean. So if you want to subscribe to my email list, my joke list, it's free and I don't sell your name or do anything with it. I'm too lazy for that. It's just, I collected a lot of jokes and now I'm still collecting jokes. I think I've sent out 11 ,000 jokes, all unique.
Adam (34:08.526)
Oh my gosh.
Al Lowe (34:11.905)
I never duplicate. If I get a duplicate one, I don't send it out. So, yeah. You know, it would be a thousand pages probably. Well, I set it up once as a book and it was 700 pages, but that was a long time ago. So, yeah.
Adam (34:15.342)
That's amazing. I see a book you could publish and then just sit and collect that.
Adam (34:27.054)
Wow. I love it. Well, thanks for sharing the laughs and thanks for sharing all the information. It was really great to get the chat. Until the next time, everyone, game on.